Stadtwerke + Grenzstraße 1992
Originally I worked on this wall with silver at night together with a friend, when we got busted by undercover cops. The problem was a crewmember came to visit us while we were painting and he was so careful to turn out the lights of his bike on the road to enter the dark yard behind the houses at the train line where we were painting. The cops who sat in their car watched him and of course followed him. So just when he said 'hello' the cops were there. My friend and me couldn´t run away cause there were fences on both sides of our spot and a cop on each side, so we tried to hide under what I think was a high voltage transformer. But after a while it became obvious we couldn´t escape and they warned us about the danger of this transformer, so we gave up. They then found out that we were teenage graffiti writers, they thought we were burglars or something. They had a moment of thinking wether they should let us go, but their sense of duty didn´t allow it. So they said we should think about contacting the owner of the wall and ask him to disclaim a complaint, which is what I actually did. It turned out it were the "Stadtwerke" (municipal utilities) and I offered them to paint a piece on commission. They even payed for the spraycans and I ordered as much as I could without making it look too obvious. That way I painted a piece at the train line near main station which is still there up to today, went away without a complaint and had lots of cans for further work.
Using these spraycans I created my most respected piece for the year at our little 'hall of fame'. The character on the side was done by Scez / Keno, who died in winter 2004-2005.
This is a photo showing the whole wall with a couple of friends hanging around. Above my piece you see an also well-respected "TSW" piece by again Scez / Keno.
Pandoras Box – das Video!
Hier nun die Video-Dokumentation der diesjährigen Graffitiperformance.
Pandoras Box from Kenmo on Vimeo.
This is the second Graffitiperformance I produced. Like the first one it´s all black-and-white, music and "Zeitgeist"-issues. Unlike the first one this time we worked on a cube with four segments that can be rotated. This was quite a challenge to work with technically, since it was all new and we really didn´t have much time for our rehearsals. After the unexpected success of "Wandeln" last year it was hard to satisfy the high expectations anyway. In the end I think we worked out something good, but in my vision it could have been even better (which probably is the normal state of an artist, eh?!).
The first scene shows a person with a TV-head (a box!) bombarded with brainwash-propaganda from three screens until he finally doubts his identification with this virtual reality and asks himself the question "who am I?". This becomes the turning point. While the painted wall rotates imagine the person turning around in the room, away from the screens, still not knowing who he really is, just to find himself in the next bigger box like a prison cell confronted with surveillance and police brutality directed by a capitalist death figure in the second scene. Now they ask him to "identify yourself!". The third scene shows the usual system-identification-boxes like ID-card, bank card, smart phone and insurance card as the answer offered by the state. In the fourth scene the person finally identifies with what can never be taken away from him: his almost room-(box!)-filling body, his thoughts, feelings, impulses and consciousness as a naked man showing a face for the first time. Then the box closes again, following the original story of Pandoras Box getting closed before the last remaining thing in it can move out with the second opening: Hope!
The last scene representing hope shows the person outside of town, outside of the boxes, turning into the other direction with flying birds tied to his fingers as if he was to fly away towards the huge spiral in the night sky at the end of the picture, while the audience is left to decide wether his hope is something completely irrational like the last big illusion or wether it actually is something "reasonable", wether he´s got the magic to manifest another reality.